Lessons from X: How to bring moonshot thinking to your NGO

NEW YORK — When your job title is “director of Moonshots” at a company called X, and your products include giant stratospheric balloons, it may not seem like you would have much to offer professionals working to improve sanitation in urban slums, help smallholder farmers increase their yields, or extend health services to the hardest to reach communities. Yet Astro Teller was an in-demand speaker at United Nations General Assembly side events last week, with delegates wanting to understand how X — a sibling company of Google that works on radical solutions to vast challenges using cutting-edge technology — operates. The Sustainable Development Agenda is one of the frameworks the X team considers when identifying the kinds of problems they want to solve. And the approach taken by this self-described “culture engineer” holds valuable lessons for leaders of NGOs and others working to accelerate progress on sustainable development solutions. Devex listened in on Teller’s advice at We the Future, a side event organized by the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation that presented models for change to accelerate progress on sustainable development solutions in New York last week. Here are five lessons he offered. 1. Ask your team to make it “10x better, not 10% better” The 10 times versus 10 percent idea that Teller often speaks about refers to the exponential versus incremental change that will be needed to achieve the SDGs. But in his talk, he provided more detail on how to navigate a team through that shift in thinking. And while his out-of-this-world office space in Mountain View, California, looks nothing like most donor organizations or NGO offices, his secrets of engaging a workforce in exponential thinking have broad relevance. “Telling people to go do something 10 times bigger than people have tried to do it before is not by itself clear or motivating,” he said. “You have to unpack it. Why are we doing that?” One reason is to do with the payoffs of the work. When you are given a task that seems so daunting it enters the realm of the impossible, you know you basically have to start over rather than just make improvements to what you have, Teller said. But if you succeed, the payoff of is huge relative to a 10 percent improvement. Thinking in terms of 10 times versus 10 percent also puts someone in a completely different frame of mind. “I just took you from an intellectual place, a smartness competition with everyone in the world, to a place of creativity where you lived as a child, and that is an incredibly powerful place,” he said. He described the team at X as “Peter Pans with PhDs,” saying he wants to bring out this youthful creativity in people “to go look in green fields that people haven’t been weird enough to go look into before.” 2. Kill projects When someone at X brings Teller something that is only 10 percent better, he tells them that is not how they work. Social norms kick in, he said, and this disincentive to make only marginal improvements is replaced with incentives to make exponential improvements — a shift that inspires people to work harder and stay later. But even when an X employee brings him something that is 10 times better, he said the trick is in recognizing what is and isn’t going to work, then having the intellectual honesty to kill projects that don’t have a future. “I can point to multiple people at X who got promoted right after they killed a project. And if you can’t do that in your organization, you will not have your projects end, no matter how bad they are,” he said. 3. Make things visceral A common saying at X is #monkeyfirst. It comes from an example of storytelling to motivate employees to do their work differently. If you wanted to get a monkey to stand on top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare, would you first build the pedestal or train the monkey? Teller first asked that question a couple of years ago to convey what he means by starting with the hardest parts of the problem first, and it has stuck with his employees. Building the pedestal does not get you very far. Your boss might say “nice pedestal,” but that would be a waste of time. People at X are constantly reminding each other to make sure the part of the problem they are working on is the monkey and not the pedestal. If Teller had simply said to his team they needed to work on the hardest parts of the problem first, it would not have been as visceral as the #monkeyfirst story. 4. Embrace tensions Teller expects X employees to be “passionately dispassionate,” “responsibly irresponsible,” and “patiently impatient.” For example, while they should work passionately on their projects, they should be able to pause dispassionately every once in awhile and ask: “Are we wasting our time or not? Could we do something better, more good for the world, if we worked on something else?” When it comes to being responsibly irresponsible, X’s Peter Pans with PhDs are as weird as possible — but on purpose, and with some control, he said. When you are working on something that will take five to 10 years to really get out into the world — as was the case with Project Loon, the internet connectivity project that X is becoming known for — it is easy to fall into a trap of thinking it doesn’t make much difference if you work really hard one day and not so hard the next. “If we don’t work hard today, if we aren’t impatient every single day, it’s not going to take five to 10 years; it’s going to take never. It’s just never going to happen,” Teller said. That message certainly has resonance for the SDGs, which start with a goal as bold as ending poverty in all its forms by 2030 and will require hard work everyday for the next 13 years. 5. Pick a problem and take it on People always come to Teller and say, “Other people can do moonshots, but I can’t.” Large companies say it’s too much risk; small companies say they don’t have the money; academics say they write about moonshots, but they don’t take them themselves. “Moonshots is not about how much money you have,” Teller said. “All you need is bravery, and everyone has that. You need creativity, and everyone has that. You have to be willing to iterate, to be very scrappy, to try something, believe that something huge is possible — but then start really small and try something. Everyone can do that. It doesn’t take a lot of money.” Teller did not comment on some of the reasons the global development community might provide for not taking moonshots. Individuals working in resource-limited settings may say they don’t have things such as stable internet connections — or even reliable electricity or running water — that other innovators might take for granted. Organizations that work on sensitive issues or with vulnerable communities may face some very real challenges in taking the same kinds of risks that are possible in Silicon Valley. And donor-funded organizations may say they cannot take moonshots because it’s not in the interest of their donors or because they need to keep the project going so that the funding continues. And yet, the people who are closest to the problems the SDGs aim to address are best positioned to provide the moonshots, which occur when you couple a problem that is seemingly impossible to solve with technology and the conviction that the problem actually can be solved. “Don’t wait for someone else to do the moonshot” he said. “You can do the moonshot.” Devex delivers cutting-edge insights and analysis to the leaders shaping and innovating the business of development. Make sure you don't miss out. Become a Devex Executive Member today.